Texas A&M University has installed a new $2.1 million supercomputer, nicknamed "Terra," which will support research projects such as developing new drugs, forecasting storm surges and managing energy sources.

For several years, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has used Splunk Enterprise to monitor the efficiency of its IT infrastructure and to help identify potential issues. Now, the institution is tapping into the analytics platform for academic research, mining data from the learning management system to better understand how students learn.

Cloud investment is mostly expected to grow next year in higher education; 81 percent of IT leaders or professionals said their institutions would be increasing spending on cloud computing in 2017. Sixty percent said they're integrating cloud thinking into their IT strategies. But it will take a few more years before the majority of applications in colleges are running in the cloud. Today 39 percent of apps are cloud-based; by 2021 it could be closer to 62 percent. Those results came from a survey done among IT respondents who work in government or higher education by MeriTalk, a publishing company focused on government IT, on behalf of sponsors NetApp and Avnet, which are both technology providers.